Chris 2

LOL - Charles?

I’m still working on season 5. Boy, Cole is an uptight, humorless, judgmental jerk. It doesn’t help that the actor playing him is pretty limited. But Cole is acting like a mini-Chase and he can’t be more than 25 or 26. And he has a lot of nerve calling Melissa a “tramp,” like he’s Tuscany Valley’s answer to the church lady.

Great scene. Donna Mills was GOLD.

Your comments about Jean and Falcon Crest are spot on. Also agree that Ben was on borrowed time when he decided to leave. He wasn’t part of the core, and they were stripping down to the core at that point.

I always thought this was a great cliffhanger, but found the resolution less than satisfying. I really wanted Valene to get revenge on Jill, beyond just terrorizing Jill with scissors in her office. That said, I don’t know what that revenge would look like. Maybe stuffing dynamite down her throat a la Wile E Coyote.

The racetrack wasn’t build on top of only Falcon Crest land. But they had to condemn 10 or so acres of Falcon Crest vineyards for it. Angela was practically in tears as they bulldozed the vineyards and Chase vowed to never stop fighting until they were replanted. This happened in season 3. I don’t remember seeing the racetrack after season 5.

Interesting idea for a game show. I guess this is one of the shows replacing the cancelled Match Game and Card Sharks. Too bad she’s hosting it.

Great interview. And she’s classy in the way she speaks of her colleagues. And humble. Old school Hollywood.

I do think it was deliberate. These were not worldly people. They were wealthy, but from a small town, and not part of high society. It’s not that different from the Ewings on Dallas: they didn’t travel in glamorous circles and weren’t showy with their wealth (at least not originally). They didn’t live in an enormous house with high ceilings and didn’t dress to the nines. They drove station wagons and Cabriolets and Lincolns. Now, Mark Graison on Dallas was more worldly: he clearly traveled more and played polo and was more a part of high society when compared with the Ewings.

Poor Angela, so unstylish and provincial.

I never bought the Richard/Angela retcon and thought it was patently absurd, given the actions of Jacqueline and Douglas in the earlier seasons. It was the type of lazy writing you see on daytime soaps. I expected more from the nighttime shows. But yeah I agree that they did it because Chase was leaving and they wanted that familial connection. Which is funny because they didn’t really mention that connection between Angela and Chase after the first few seasons. And she always treated him as an outsider. In fact, I thought some of the things she pulled on him were pretty awful considering he was her nephew. But she had no love for him at all.

Yep - it is. It’s fascinating how Maggie managed to write a whole book and no one even knew about it. I hated the Jeff Wainwright story too. I always found Edward Albert (Wainwright) to be an unappealing performer, so that doesn’t help. Neither does his mustache. And of course, when Falcon Crest had an almost-complete change in the writing and production staff between seasons 5 and 6, the Wainwright story was the one thing the new regime kept. It also set into motion the events leading to the dissolution of Chase and Maggie’s marriage, which I also didn’t like.

My issue with him is that he wasn’t really the same Steve Frame. The old Steve Frame would have never entertained the idea of getting together with Rachel again, not after what she put him through. Then again, I don’t think the old Alice would have agreed to be Rachel’s doctor or spend time at the Corys for the holidays, and yet she did (and was again played by Jacqui Courtney). So blame the writers, not the actors.

The other thing that makes no sense about season 5 is the show going back to the “Angela wants to drive Chase out of the valley” stories. Why? In season one, she was trying to do this because she didn’t want Chase to discover the truth about Jason’s death, and wanted to prevent him from inheriting Falcon Crest. In seasons 2-4, Chase is Angela’s partner in FC and she wants to get rid of him. But by season 5, they were no longer partners, and there was no longer the possibility that Chase would inherit FC or regain control. So what was the point of those plots? It seemed like Angela wanted to drive him out just to be nasty. It didn’t ring true.

I’m to the point where Angela disappears for a few episodes and I have to agree. The Jordan portion of the show is kind of ridiculous. Lance is at loose ends with Babylonia gone. I’m really missing the season-long mystery arc the show had in its best seasons. I think in previous years, they sat down and plotted what where the whole season was headed (like season 2 with the Carlo Agretti murder). In this one, it feels like they’re doing that every six episodes or so.

Yep - Lorimar considered returning both Dallas and Falcon Crest to the self-contained format for the 1988-89 season. They mentioned in the press it would allow them to do stories like one where Bobby tracks down his old basketball coach to give him some bad news. Thrilling!

He sounds terribly misguided. There’s nothing employers love more than their employees complaining publicly about their jobs. And we’re not talking about someone who was drop-dead handsome or had charisma to spare or was the second coming of Olivier.

Eh - hard to shed a lot of tears for him when there were so many other male-oriented shows (including soaps such as Dallas). Doug Sheehan had a four year run on the show - that’s pretty good for someone who is essentially coming between the one of the main couples on the show.

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, Chris B. I’m about a third of a way through it now. I’m enjoying it. As you said, it’s the last season of traditional FC. I’m surprised Anne Archer (Cassandra) is still hanging around - long after her revenge storyline was resolved. Not sure why. But I remember that she didn’t make it through the whole season. The music videos for Babylonia are a bit much. And they had an episode where she sang at a country and western bar (where Emma first met Dwayne) and she was totally off key. Dwayne and Emma’s romance, BTW, happened way too quickly - before they even developed Dwayne as a character. Robin is another character who deserved more development. I don’t love Morgan Fairchild’s character. Too brittle. i do like Ken Olin as Father Christopher, but he has an accent that I find a little distracting. Chicago, maybe?

Trying to resurrect Alice/Steve/Rachel without any of the original actors was just foolhardy. And Alice is going to be foolish enough to get involved with Rachel’s ex-husband after all the misery she went through with Steve and Rachel 10 years earlier? Ridiculous. The tea scene makes me laugh. If I am ever rich enough to have a live-in maid, I will insist that she wears a black uniform with a white frilly apron and cap, a la Vivian. Mac needs to run a tighter ship where Louise is concerned.

The funny thing about the Ewings is that they don’t really lead a glamorous lifestyle. They live in a house where everyone enters through a sliding glass door. And they drive Cabriolets and Lincolns and station wagons.

Dallas used film the interiors for the first six episodes at MGM, then would film the exteriors for the first 12 episodes on location, then go back to MGM and film the interiors for the second six episodes. Then, the rest of the season was shot in LA (similar to what French Bug describes above). The final location-based episode would usually be the Ewing BBQ or some milestone episode and then they’d shift to the fake Southfork. They filmed this way until the final two seasons, where they eliminated the location shooting due to budget. I agree that FC got more out of its location shoots than Dallas did. But it helps that the Napa Valley is prettier, so i think the locations managers had more to choose from. The area around Dallas is not particularly pretty in general. The city itself is kind of non-descript and the area is flat and dry, with lots of strip malls. Other cities in Texas - like Forth Worth and Austin - are much more interesting-looking. I did think that the Dallas revival used the location shooting much more effectively. The manor house at the Spring Mountain Winery, which was Angela’s house on FC, is much closer to what you see on TV than the real-life Southfork interiors are. The real life Southfork was never used on the original series, and the interior sets were based on another house in the Dallas area. But the Spring Mountain Manor house actually was used for interiors in at least the pilot, and the entrance area and main staircase are the model for the sets they used later on, which adhere to the style of the original house.

The season after Bobby’s return actually had the smallest drop in Dallas ratings in several seasons. The show’s ratings average for the 1986-87 was only a half rating point lower than the previous season, though the overall ranking was several places lower since there were so many highly-rated half hour sitcoms in the top 10 that year. It was the following year, after Victoria Principal’s departure, when the ratings truly plummeted.

They had a pretty ugly divorce that I recall. The tabloids covered it closely. I recall he left her for Nicolette Sheridan.

Two things. As you pointed out, CBS didn’t have any blockbuster comedies, and comedies were in vogue at that point. NBC was doing gangbusters with its comedy lineup, but CBS was dependent on a lineup of aging dramas. The second problem was that was the season that Nielsen switched from a diary method of measuring audiences to electronic “People Meters.” Series with older audiences showed a significant decline from the previous season. The thinking was that older audiences had been more diligent about filling out their diaries than younger audiences had been, so those older audiences had been over-represented in the Nielsen sample. People Meters were considered more accurate, since no one had to fill anything out.